Author: Michael Grønager 2011-11-09 20:31:44
Published on: 2011-11-09T20:31:44+00:00
In a chain of emails, Gavin Andresen proposed the use of the P2P network to distribute signatures. He initially expressed his concerns about partially-signed transactions being spammed, however, he later suggested broadcasting complete transactions that contain extra signatures for the transaction that needs to be signed and paying fees for it. He presented an idea that could be considered brilliant or stupid by starting with an escrow transaction with three public keys. One key is owned by him, and he broadcasts a 'fee-only' transaction that pays zero bitcoins to the key he owns. However, he adds extra data to the scriptSig which the other parties can monitor the blockchain for proposed "spend the funds in escrow" transaction from the scriptSig. The parties to the transaction will have to pay for the extra data they are including, and everything in the scriptSigs can theoretically be forgotten (or never sent) to most nodes on the network once the transaction is spent and buried deep enough in the block chain. The only advantage he sees in using the blockchain instead of directly connecting to and finding out the IP addresses of the parties involved is that it might be more anonymous. Michael Gronager responded positively to Gavin's idea and commented that it adds a pricetag to distributing a signature and will be part of the standard. However, he thinks that the parties will need to know at least about each other's public keys upfront and hence the 0-conf might not be that important.
Updated on: 2023-06-04T21:13:26.351783+00:00